Why travel is so exciting

Wednesday May 2, 2007

We finished last night so today I prepared to leave. There are only 5 cars servicing the area and three of them were still trapped on the other side of the landslide further up the road. Since the other two were down in the city, there would be no vehicles going down that day. So my computer, my bag and me were loaded on a motorbike which someone else drove. It stopped raining that morning for awhile and the sun came out. I didn’t have a helmet to wear so I just tied a scarf on my head. (To hold my brains in in case we crashed???) It took an hour and a half to get to the next town where there were cars available and during that time the sun shone brightly. Unfortunately, a scarf isn’t much good at providing shade so my face became quite, uh, ultra-violetly challenged.

Arriving in that town we stopped first at the agent to buy a ticket. We were told the car would leave at 2 or 3 or something and would pick me up. Didn’t sound too iminant so we went to a friend’s house to wait and hopefully eat something. Unfortunately the mini-bus actually came at 2 shortly after we arrived so I literally only got a bite before I got in the car. My seat was in the very back and I couldn’t sit up straight because the seat was high and the roof low. (The front seat, which was lower and had more head room, had already been booked so I was kind of stuck.) Fortunately I was by the window so I focussed on breathing and looking at the scenery and avoided thinking about claustrophobic topics. The mini-bus puttered around the town picking up passengers for about another hour and we finally left. It started raining again about then which at least kept it cool. We passed through several places with evidence of a recently cleared landslides. About an hour down the road the gal next to me got car sick so she flung herself over me to get to the window. We traded places – just in time. It wasn’t so bad cuz I could lean forward or use one of two other methods of scrunching to avoid my head whacking the roof on the bumpy road. (Method 1: sit back and hunch your upper back. Method 2: scoot forward and sit on your tailbone and scrunch your lower back.) The driver stopped from 5:15-6pm to eat and so I was able to sit on a sack of cacao beans on the floor by the door where I had plenty of head room to sit straight and rest my back. We then started the last hour and a half of the trip. Once again my neighbor got car sick so we did a quick switcheroo. Though by this time my back was starting to cramp, I managed to get out at my stop without help :-) and have since been reflecting on the advantages of motorbikes.